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A Letter to Readers: On Turning Two

Around2Turns made its Internet debut on May 11, 2014. If blogs were racehorses this one would have turned two years old early this morning. While the frequency of our postings has always tended towards the infrequent, during its first 15 months the blog at least managed to eke out an average of one post every two weeks. But in the past five months that leisurely pace has gone glacial, with the posting schedule lurching undeniably from “roughly fortnightly” towards a slow-motion, head-on collision with “never”.

While you never want to fall easily into that old “correlation = causation” trap, in this case you can make the exception. Our debut as a weekly racing commentator for the Blood-Horse Daily did not merely coincide with the sudden demise of semi-regular posting here at Around2Turns, it was the cause. Apparently when you ladle on the demands of a weekly column to a plate already piled high with full-time employment, marriage, unpaid blogging and a generally lazy nature, it is the blogging that will wind up taking the worst of it.

This result was not unexpected. Our politics are radical environmentalism when it comes to protecting lazy natures, especially our own. But there comes a time when you must consider your semi-dormant blog in the cold morning light and ask yourself one question: Can your lazy nature possibly suck it up a little and find the time to write both the B-HD column and a weekly blog post? While not much on resolutions (we notice they are the things that tend to get broken) the plan for 2016 is to keep doing those things we’ve been doing (only do them a little better), while also adding at least one weekly (late-week) post here at Around2Turns.

As we mused back in early August, perhaps the blog … “will morph into more of a traditional blog, with shorter, more frequent, and more casual observations on the racing scene, with a 2,000-word opus thrown in every now and then when suitable”. Maybe it will become more (for lack of a better word) “personal”, allowing for some occasional excursions into non-thoroughbred areas within the New York circuit, without losing whatever horseplay and handicapping-related mojo still resides beneath this URL. If nothing else, please take from this letter the understanding that we will at least try to do something fun and interesting in this space.

Now that the mostly blank space here over the last five months has been explained, and tentative plans have been revealed, I can get on with the business of wishing happy birthday to all the thoroughbreds, and a happy 2016 to my readers here and at the B-HD. Happy New Year one and all!